Adventures of an Aviatrix, in which a pilot travels the skies and the treacherous career path of Canadian commercial aviation, gaining knowledge and experience without losing her step, her licence, or her sense of humour.

Friday, June 10, 2005

Airline Names

If you've just stumbled across this blog or are unfamiliar with the airlines in Canada, you may be wondering why Canadian airlines have such odd names. They don't really. Only in this blog. To protect my anonymity, their secrets, and my job search strategy, or possibly just to make this blog more amusing, whenever I mention an airline in a context not involving a news story I replace the company name.

I could call them Airline A, Airline B and so on, but that doesn't draw you into my world. So I've named them after burrowing mammals. That's right, furry animals that dig holes. To be strictly accurate, some of the animals prefer to appropriate existing holes rather than do their own digging, and many of the names are actually alternate names for the same animals, but I'm in a country that had a Skyward and a Skywords, a Pacific Coastal and a Coastal Pacific, an Air Labrador and a Labrador Air, and an Air Canada and a Canadian Airlines. I think my way is easier. I cycle through the alphabet, so the first twenty-six airlines, each start with a different letter. That way if you can't distinguish between an Ichneumon and a Quoll as easily as between an A320 and an A319, you can just go by the letters.

There is no correspondance between the characteristics or names of the animals and those of the airlines. I simply grab the next animal off my list. Aardvark to Zibellina and then back to Armadillo. If somewhere in Canada there is an airline named after a burrowing mammal then (a) why? and (b) I have never worked for nor applied to work there. Amusingly, this site is on the first page of search results for "burrowing mammals" on google.ca.

In addition, the chief pilot of any airline I talk about is arbitrarily named Steve. Most of them seem to be named Steve anyway. Any other other staff I need to speak to receive pseudonyms. Someday I'm going to walk into an airline office and be told "You'll need to speak to Steve Fox about that," and I'm going to have to explain what is so funny.